Sleeve tips from Vitale Barberis Canonico

Vitale Barberis Canonico, one of the oldest woollen mills of the world, celebrates bespoke tailoring with the project Tailor’s Tips, a series of 12 videos in which the master tailor Giovanni Barberis Organista, directed by Gianluca Migliarotti, tells what happens behind the scenes when a hand-stitched suit is created.

The eighth episode of the online tutorials by Giovanni Barberis Organista is about sleeves.

Put an iron-on swatch, on a small cloth that allows to make a buttonhole. Take the interfacing, it’s placed so the fold at the bottom is a centimetre and a half and it’s basted it. Basting is something, which must be done standing, then sit to do the finishings, for the over-stitching. Many people to do this, instead of doing it by hand, with an interfacing of light-weight camel hair.

It is better when the bottom of a sleeve is rather solid, a bit full, not weak. Years ago, people used something that had a French name “changeant”. In that period, there were fabrics, which weighed 500 gr, but today the fabrics are lighter, so the interfacing would be unnecessary.

The bottom of the sleeve is folded up by hand and try to make sure the upper part is a little looser than the inner part.

Basically, a sleeve should be like the lid on a box. If the box is big, the lid will be bigger. In this case the armhole is rather small, so, in tailoring there a tendency to make the sleeve a bit looser, and distribute these looseness, so that it makes a bit of a gather.

The buttonholes are made with buttonholer, it is then sewed and the sleeve is lined.